Lost
by rimera
Summary: Due to a time machine accident, Trunks finds himself trapped in the alternate timeline he helped to create. Adopted from Takuma.
1. Chapter 1

Yes, I'm back, no more school. I know I've got a couple of other stories, but I'll be working on them, too, as well as this one. I adopted this story from Takuma, and it was a really great idea. So, there are many stories out there, poor, helpless things without a home. Won't you adopt a story today?

I don't own DBZ.

LOST

Chapter 1

It was raining. The man hunched deeper into his trench coat as he made his way for the barely visible entryway of the old Highgate Hotel. Tonight was a bad night, the man thought to himself as he made it to the entrance. The great archway shielded him from most of the rain, at least long enough for him to catch his breath. He didn't want to stay too long... no telling who could be calling these ruins home now. Most of the buildings were like this... piles of rubble, empty shells, or just half of a building left of them. When the androids had tired of hunting people to kill, they amused themselves with destroying the great structures mankind had built in times of peace. At least, until that kid had come along and saved everybody.

The man harrumphed to himself at his own thoughts. After all, the kid might have killed off the androids, but there was no saving them from what the androids had done to their society. He used to be a lawyer... now he was barely fed, hiding in the ruins of a hotel, and about to commit a crime. He felt the weight of the gun in his pocket that he had stolen off a dead policeman a while back. He needed it more than the policeman did... not only to protect himself, but his daughter. Life had become a fight to survive, in the midst of so much devastation. Humans were fighting against humans for any stray morsel, anything of value that they could trade for food. This was no life... it was hell.

He looked around before making his way across the street. There was one building in this area that had been rebuilt, and he hoped he might find food there, if not by begging, then by theft. He walked as fast as he could to Capsule Corp.

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Trunks gave a loud cry as he fired the Galactic Gun attack at the barren desert mountain. A great crash was heard, as most of the mountain disintegrated before his eyes. He had been practicing the attack his father taught him, putting more and more energy into it each time. It didn't matter to Trunks how strategic the attack was, only that his father had taught it to him. He thought of his father a lot lately, of that year he had spent with him in the Room of Spirit and Time, as they prepared for the battle with Cell in the other timeline. He sighed. The time he spent with his father wasn't intimate... they hadn't even sparred together. But he had watched his father, watched him for a year, and everything he ever needed to know about his father, he could see by watching him train. He learned his father's attacks, learned of his discipline and his unwillingness to quit. He had learned of his weaknesses, too... whether his father would admit them or not. And he promised himself that in his own way, he would become just like his father.

He breathed deeply, then resumed his training, using the same techniques he had seen his father use so many times.

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Bulma yawned as she pored over her blueprints, making corrections here, adding more detail there, trying to bring perfection to her newest invention in the dim light. The generator they used was old and damaged, and often the lights would go out and she would have to bring her work outside just to see it. The dimly lit room and the sound of dripping water from the leaks in the ceiling threatened to lull her to sleep, but she fought it. This invention was going to help more than a few people, and she was sure it would be the first step to rebuilding their city. If she could only get it to work.

She looked up suddenly, thinking she heard a sound, but when only the dripping water was heard, she went back to her work. Ideas spun through her head, more than one at a time, as she contemplated the blueprint before her, another invention idea, and a list of things she would have Trunks do as soon as he got back from training. The first thing on the list was to fix the leaky ceiling.

Suddenly she felt a presence closeby, and spun around in her chair to see a gun pointed at her face.

"Just do what I say, and no one will get hurt," the man promised.

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Trunks looked up suddenly, sensing danger. His mother! As fast as he could, he flew back to the city, faster than human eyes could ever hope to see. He pushed himself faster and faster, keeping focused on his mother's ki, until he could see the outline of the city over the horizon. And just like that, Bulma's ki faded.

"Mother!" he cried, eventually crashing through a wall of the building. He was by her side in an instant... but it was too late. His eyes misted as he saw her lying there limp, her eyes open and lifeless, a trickle of blood coming from the gunshot wound in her forehead. "Mother!" he yelled, still calling to her, as though she could just return to her body, and everything would be okay. But she didn't return, and Trunks cried out, crushing her lifeless body to him as he went Super-saiyan, then Super-saiyan 2, and would have gone up a level or two if a thought hadn't struck him... who had done this to his mother?

His more primal Saiyan instincts kicked in, and he sniffed the air. It wasn't hard to catch the unfamiliar scent... the man hadn't showered in what seemed like a month or two. It was definitely a man, he could tell. And he also knew how he had left the building. His eyes narrowed in hatred, he dropped the lifeless body of his mother, and began to track his prey.


	2. Chapter 2

Hello, again. Time for yet another chapter. Sorry if these come out slow, but I've got three of them going on at once, not to mention I work 12 hours a day... (Feel sorry for me yet? hehe). Anyways, here's today's public service announcement:

For just 12 cents a day, you can help one of these orphaned stories. You can give them water to drink, food to eat, and better medical supplies. We'll send you a brochure, and you can select a small story to give a better world to. Please adopt a story today. You may be its only hope.

I don't own DBZ.

A little girl with torn clothes and wide eyes watched with excitement as her father emptied the contents of the large sack. Hundreds of shiny little trinkets littered the floor of the small leaky room they shared in the old warehouse. The girl picked one up delicately, gasping when the lights came on as she brushed her finger against the tiny screen. She looked up to her father hopefully. "Can we keep one? Just one, Daddy?"

Her father grimaced, shaking his head slowly. Something seemed wrong with him, and the girl was automatically worried. "Daddy, are you feeling okay?" she asked, kneeling beside him where he sat on the floor, his hands shaking.

"I'm fine, honey," her father lied, taking her in his arms. "We can't keep any of these things, honey. I'm sorry. I... I did bad things to get them."

The girl didn't understand. Her father had told her that, even though stealing was wrong, the world was in so much chaos that they no longer had a choice. He had stolen many things, and so had she, so that they could get one more meal, one more small bite to eat, before the next day when they had to do it all over again. But now her father was pale and sweaty, and in her gut she knew something bad had happened, something worse than stealing.

But her thoughts were interrupted by someone crashing through the door.

Having had experience with looters before, the girl quickly hid in a small hole in the wall. It was a good hiding place, as there was never enough light to see into the small cubbyhole, and the spider webs and a loose hanging board helped shield her from onlookers. Her father had told her, soon after the troubles started, that some people would want more than whatever food or valuables they had with them... some would want her, and would want to do very bad things to her. So, whenever the looters came, she always hid, and her father always dealt with them – either by giving them a little and convincing them to leave the rest, or by pulling out his gun – or both. But, as the little girl listened, she realized that this was no ordinary looter.

"Wh-who are you?" the man asked, frightened, both by the intruder's appearance and by the look of utter hatred in his eyes. Suddenly he noticed the Capsule Corp logo on his jacket, and whatever color was in his face drained out of it. "L-listen, I can explain –" suddenly his words were strangled gargles as the intruder's hand was around his throat in an instant.

"YOU," he said, rage screaming in his voice, though his voice was not much more than a whisper. "You killed my mother!"

The man's vision began to darken as he mouthed the words he hoped would save his life: "I'm sorry,".

Trunks narrowed his eyes, nostrils flaring in anger. Visions of his mother lying on the floor stayed with him, and the pain of them caused the muscles in his hand to clench... and the man's neck to snap.

Startled at the sound, Trunks dropped the man, now a lifeless corpse. Hearing the thud and instinctively knowing what had happened, the little girl ran out of her hiding place to the body of her father. "No! Father! What did you do to my father!" the little girl cried, putting the man's head on her lap, much like Trunks had done for his own mother's body.

And Trunks looked down at what he had done, and saw himself again, only this time, he was the bad guy. He shook his head, as if to deny what had happened. "I... I didn't mean to..." was all he could get out, before the little girl started screaming.

"Murderer! Murderer!" Suddenly sounds came from all around them, and Trunks realized that the warehouse housed more than just the man and his daughter. There were no police anymore, but in the interests of self-preservation, people nowadays tended to take the punishment of murderers into their own hands, particularly when it happened where they lived. Whether from the threat to his life, or from the scene of what he had done, Trunks fled. He ran out of the warehouse and flew to the only place he felt safe... Capsule Corp.

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The lights were all off... someone had stolen the generator. Realizing his home had been broken into again, he picked up his mother's body, and flew away... the sounds of a mob approaching in the distance telling him he could never go home again.

Rain pelted the ground as Trunks looked down at the mound of earth that now housed his mother's body. Thoughts of what had happened and what he had done entered his mind slowly, one at a time, as he wasn't strong enough to handle it all at once. There had to be something he could do, something to fix this... something to make everything better, as though it had never happened...

Trunks' head snapped up as he remembered the time machine. If he could use it to change the fate of another timeline, and get strong enough to defeat the androids and Cell, then surely he could use it to go back in time and save his mother! Thinking quickly, he sped back to Capsule Corp, hoping against hope that it hadn't been destroyed by the angry mob.

When he got there, the entire building was on fire. Trunks ran in, careful not to damage the already unstable structure of the building. It didn't take him long to spot the time machine. The window was cracked, and it looked as though someone had hit it a couple of times with a sledgehammer, but other than that, it was in one piece. Thankful for small miracles, Trunks grabbed a toolkit from the floor, missing a few instruments, but not the ones he needed, and grabbed the time machine. Careful not to damage it any more, Trunks blasted a hole through the roof and flew out of the building, time machine in tow. Desperate hope began to work its way into his mind, and images of his mother alive, laughing, began to convince him that this was all just a bad dream... a dream he was about to wake up from.


	3. Chapter 3

I do not own DBZ.

It was raining again. It always seemed to rain lately, Trunks thought, as he looked out the window of his 50th floor corner office. A female's voice droned on behind him, a constant reminder of why he couldn't just fly off into the rain. It was cold and wet outside, but at least there was fresh air, and it wasn't boring... sighing, he turned back to the woman who was still reading off the list of subjects he needed to bone up on for his next meeting. Who was he supposed to meet again? Oh, right, those big-wigs from oversees... they were trying to build another Capsule Corp, a chain of them. Great.

With another wistful look out the window, Trunks sat down in his chair and began to actually listen to what his secretary was saying.

"...and all the financial records from the last 20 years, plus they've also requested a complete list of every invention worked on by our staff for that time period, including the ones not put up for market..."

"What?" Trunks interrupted. Kicking himself for not having listened this entire time, Trunks softened his voice at his secretary's startled expression. "They're demanding a lot aren't they? I mean, we haven't even signed any contracts with them, and they want our financial records now?"

Miss Scarlet nodded knowingly. "I was wondering when you'd catch that, sir. They say it's for good financial prediction, but that could have been done with just the total amount spent over the last 20 years... it hardly calls for a complete financial accounting. Your mother was very frugal with this company when she ran it, but still..."

Trunks grinned, quietly thankful that his secretary had a good grasp of common sense, despite his own absentmindedness. "So, they're not looking just to build chains... they want control, too," he said, winking at Miss Scarlet. "Well... we can't know until this meeting... and I've got just the idea on how to draw them out." He stood, stretching his legs, finally getting into his work again.

Miss Scarlet lifted her head, surprised. "Do you want me to withhold the financial records then, sir?"

Trunks smirked. "No, give them the financial records. Only... they need to be updated. The record keeping twenty years ago did tend to be a bit vague... Often when my mother would work on a project, she simply typed, 'Company Expense', then listed the amount. Haven't you noticed that to be true about my mother's records, Miss Scarlet?"

The black-haired secretary tilted her head, confused, then a look of realization dawned on her face. "R-right, Mr. Briefs. Your mother's records... it was impossible to see exactly what she was working on. All the way until you took over, that is..."

Trunks scowled in thought. "You know, sometimes my mother still handles our financial records... She likes having her hand in things, even though she's retired. In fact, I don't think it would be a stretch to say that she handles all our financial records..."

Miss Scarlet smiled. "Yes, she has been very helpful, offering to take care of that detail while you run the rest of the company. Perhaps she insists on being in charge of the company's finances... being the major stockholder and one of the creators of Capsule Corp..."

"And being my mother... she probably thinks the finances are safer with her..." Trunks and his secretary shared a look of mutual humor, then a sour look passed over his face. "If they ask, you may also let them know that a lot of the projects we've worked on in the past were kept top secret by our government... military contracts, if you catch my drift."

Miss Scarlet nodded. "Right. Which ones, sir, were top secret? Perhaps all of them?"

Trunks hesitated, then shook his head. "No, don't want them to be too suspicious. But we did have certain projects that would, once taken to other countries, be used by their military... we want to avoid a fiasco. My mother's work on gravitational alterations, for instance... her space craft are already on the market, but certain other things... just bring me the list, and I will try to remember which ones were involved with military contracts."

Miss Scarlet nodded, somewhat amused. Here was the young Mr. Briefs, actually asking her to bring him a list! Folding her pad of paper, she got up. "Anything else for you, Mr. Briefs?" she asked.

Trunks smirked. "Yeah... a raincoat."

Miss Scarlet shook her head, exasperated. "Yes, sir," she said, and left the office. Just when he was starting to get all fired up about his job...

A/N: Sorry for the scene change, but I needed one. Mirai Trunks and I have a problem on our hands that we need to fix... but don't worry, with the two of us (mostly him) working on it, you'll see him again in a chapter or so! Meanwhile, I'm trying to avoid calling him Mirai Trunks throughout the story... maybe a pleasant nickname? Like Wiggles? Who knows?


	4. Chapter 4

Trunks had never met Kami. Still, he whispered a silent prayer to him the way his mother used to as he finished his final adjustments to the time machine. He prayed not only that it would work, but that it would work the way his mother had wanted it to.

The last time he had used the time machine, Trunks had been unable to change his own past, as the very nature of time travel prohibited it. The theory went, if you went back into the past and changed something, that change would have no effect on the traveller's time line. Instead, another time line would be created, based on the changes. For the traveller to get back to his own time line, cross-dimensional travel was necessary, which was what Trunks had used to get back to his own reality from the one he had created by changing the past the last time.It was easy to do, as a dimension always left an imprint on anything that belonged to it, and objects from one dimension were not tolerated for long by another dimension. This imprint served as a homing beacon to the home dimension, and while a well-programmed cross-dimensional drive was helpful, the natural order of things had a way of puting everything back into its place, eventually.

Bulma had been working on a way to avoid this.

In an attempt to help their own timeline, she had been working on a way to fool the natural order of things into thinking that the time machine was from both the changed timeline and the original timeline, so that it would not only be able to stay in either timeline indefinitely, it would be able to essentially merge the two together, so that it became one reality. This last part was trickier, and Bulma hadn't tested it out yet, and was unwilling to do so for fear of any number of horrible things that could happen with a botched time travel. Basically, the cross-dimensional drive would move the time machine back and forth between each dimension hundreds of times, while the machine sent out a blended signal, an identity formed from both dimensions, into each so that each dimension was infected by a new identity, and essentially merged into one. This, of course, was very dangerous, which was why Bulma hadn't tried it out.

Trunks, on the other hand, had nothing to lose. All he needed to change was one day. The short time span worked in his favor, as fewer things would be changed, and the dimensional identities would be similar. And if he died, or if what he was about to attempt created some kind of mutated double-dimension, or blinked both dimensions out of existence, he didn't care. Everything that he cared about was gone...

No. He couldn't think like that. He had to keep up hope, if he was ever going to prevent his mother's death. He couldn't let it sink in yet... he had to keep his mind on what he was doing. One slip-up, and it could all end.

With these thoughts in mind, Trunks closed the panel and took a look at the time machine. No sense of pride filled him, and not really hope, either, although that word was still spray-painted on the side of the machine, where his mother had put it before his last trip through time. All that filled him now was determination, a cold, gray emotion that allowed him to put off all other emotions until his task was done.

The more he waited, the harder it would be to merge the timelines. Trunks got into the time machine, and flipped the switches that would take him back to yesterday... when his mother was nagging him about the leaky roof, not lying under six feet of dirt with a bullet in her head...


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: Sorry I've been gone for so long. I'm at a standstill for the moment on my story History of a Dark Saiyan, so it looks like Lost gets my attention. Hopefully I'll get much farther this time…

By the way, if you're wondering, this story will take place BEFORE the events of GT, and if those events never happen, well, I won't cry…

Chapter 5

Pain was the first thing Trunks noticed when he came to. Pain down his back and from his arm, and pressure against the back of his head. Opening his eyes revealed little, only that his head was against something metal, and that the lights inside the time machine were no longer functioning. Moving his left arm, he felt broken glass around him, and part of the seat above him. He couldn't move his right arm; something was on top of it. Groaning, he brought his left arm to the back of his head, but felt only metal. Something had his head pinned down. Further investigation told him it was the navigational control system, sticky with blood either from his hand where he touched it, or from the back of his head.

Trunks sighed. He really got himself into it this time. He could free himself by powering up, if he could muster up the energy, but then what was left of the machine would be unsalvageable. Biting back a gasp, Trunks pushed against the navigational console with his free hand until he heard a metallic creak, then a loud crack as the metal broke apart and his head was freed.

It turned out the object on his right arm was the time machine itself; somehow he had stuck his arm outside of it and got it pinned underneath it when he crashed. With his head free, moving the time machine was no problem, and closer inspection of his arm showed no broken bones.

The sky was gray and the smell of rain still permeated the air. Trunks dug around in the ruins of the ship and found a strip of cloth to staunch the flow of blood from his head. He wouldn't worry about the time machine just yet; first he had to find out where he was… and if he was successful.

Closing his eyes, Trunks searched for his mother's ki. It wasn't easy… there were so many other people in the city… so many…

It was as if…

"Wait! How can this be?" he muttered, barely able to speak. He could sense thousands, millions of people, all over the world. And among the strongest of them…

"Father?"

There was no denying it. It was Vegeta's ki, and it was coming from the nearby city. _Capsule Corps_.

Trunks scowled, pushing his body forward. He wasn't sure what all of this meant, and it hurt to think about it too much. All he knew was, his father was alive, and if his father was there… chances were, so was his mother.

* * *

Vegeta scowled as he powered up another blast. Late again. That brat of his had given his last excuse. Last time it was an important meeting, and the time before it was car trouble. Feh. As if he needed a car to get around. 

Spotting the robot in the corner of his eye, he fired the blast, hitting it with the precision of a trained hunter. Just as swiftly, he fazed out of sight and appeared behind the robot, knocking it to the floor with both fists. Not blind to the other robot closing on his position, he fazed out again and reappeared on the other side of the room, firing a blast that was deflected harmlessly. _Stupid boy_, he thought as he flew toward the robot, deftly dodging energy balls as they were shot at him. These times of peace would make him weak, and then what would happen when the next threat came to Earth? Regardless of their longevity compared to humans, Saiyans were hardly immortal. He and Kakarrot wouldn't always be there; it was up to the next generation to –

Vegeta was broken out of his thoughts by an energy blast that hit him in the back. Skillfully he used the force of the attack to propel him behind the second robot, and saw that the first robot had managed to get back up. Powering up another blast, he fired at the back of the second robot and sent it hurtling into the first one, until both collided with each other in a heap of smoke and metal parts. He smirked. It was a favorite game of his to destroy the robots Bulma made for him; not only did it give him the satisfaction of the kill, but it pissed Bulma off to no end – resulting in better robots, of course, as well as making his home life much more interesting.

Now if only his son wasn't such a delinquent.

A/N: More coming later... I hope...


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